The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  At one point Bobbie asked the passing cocktail waitress for a piece of paper and the loan of a pen, and when she had these she wrote something briefly then folded up the paper and slipped it into a pocket of the thin cotton blouse she was wearing. We had another round of drinks and talked silly some more, and when she had finished her most recent vodka martini Bobbie put down her glass and took the note from her blouse and handed it across the table.

  “For me?”

  “For you.”

  “If it was for me why didn’t you give it to me earlier?”

  “I wasn’t sure earlier if I wanted to give it to you.”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “Not exactly. More like a decision.”

  “A decision you had to have another martini over before you could make it.”

  “Not really. I was more teasing myself than anything else. Pretending I hadn’t really made up my mind until now. Actually I had about made up my mind when I saw you drive up to the apartment building.”

  I knew what it was all about, but I wasn’t quite prepared for my own inner reaction to it. My inner reaction was no reaction at all, which at first confused me some. But in about the time it would take a fat man to hit the ground from the roof of a one-story building I understood enough about the rich broth of Bobbie being the niece of Maribeth Robbins and the psychic’s fear of impending death and the bodies they were digging up in Jack London State Park (to say nothing of Allison France being not so much up in Barracks Cove as she was quietly, ever presently, just over my left shoulder) to accept my lack of reaction not with surprise or remorse but with inevitability. A lot of other men would feel differently I knew, staring across at the foxy young woman wearing the thin cotton blouse, but then I sat in a different pew from a lot of other men.

  I unfolded the slip of paper. Her note read, Let’s go up to your place.

  When I looked up from the note without a smile on my face, chances were she had it figured out already. “I don’t quite know how to say this.”

  She sighed and looked at me in a way that said no matter, it wasn’t going to be a mortal blow to her ego.

  “You don’t even have to say the rejection bit,” she told me. “I am a little curious, though.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough.” I looked down at the note again and smiled thinly. “There are times I would let out a whoop and go through plate glass at the prospect of something like this.”

  “Times change.”

  “Yes they do.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s nothing contagious, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Bobbie shrugged. “A girl’s apt to think all kinds of things.”

  “These days I’m sure she is. And it’s certainly nothing to do with the way I’ve thought about you from time to time.”

  Bobbie stared at me with a little frown.

  “It isn’t because I couldn’t, it’s because I can’t,” I told her. “Look, if you want some sort of endorsement, here it is. I think you’re a lot more than a saucy mouth and a perky body. I think you’re bright and irreverent and loyal and caring and feisty, and I happen to like all those things. I think if things were just a little different in my life right now I’d pick up and say to hell with everything and ask you to go off and spend a week or two with me somewhere, once Maribeth’s problem is taken care of.”

  “A week or two?” she asked with a grin.

  “Yes. This must sound a little strange under the circumstances, but you didn’t just slip away out of my mind after we met down in Carmel. I’ve had some pretty lusty thoughts about you as a matter of fact.”

  “You’re not just bullshitting me, are you?”

  “No.”

  “No. I don’t think you are, either. Then what do I have to do to make things a little different in your life right now? Who do I have to kill?”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “It is very, very complicated.”

  “I can be very, very patient. Despite what I’ve shown you to date.”

  I looked at her. “I’ll give you a short version.”

  “Better than none.”

  “I’m afraid for Maribeth. I don’t know if it’s because she might be driven to take her own life or something else. But I do think there is a life-threatening force around her. I’ve never come to grips with that until right now.” I hesitated. “I wonder why that is.”

  “Things sometimes pop out under stress. You are under stress, I take it.”

  “Yes, but it’s more than that. I’ve never known what to think of this psychic business, even after your aunt told us about the burial ground up north. Maybe it’s just now catching up with me. But more and more I can feel the danger she says she’s in. And here you are, the closest person in the world to her. Trouble rubs off.”

  Bobbie stared at me a moment, then made a little shrug. “I hate to admit it, but that makes sense.”

  “Another part of it is the enormity of the crime being unearthed up north. I’ve gotten to know myself better these past few years. I’m a little like a cocked gun when I find myself in a situation like this. Something takes over inside that dims the lights in my more civilized corners and shoves kissing and tenderness into a back seat. I’m particularly bothered by the youngsters they’re finding. A girl about sixteen, a boy twelve. Life isn’t all chuckles, but as a deputy coroner up there suggested, they should have had more of a chance, those two. Everybody deserves a chance.”

  Bobbie made a cocked gun of her own with the finger and thumb of one hand and snapped it at my chest. “I like kissing and I like to be kissed, but it isn’t exactly a grand necessity when I’m naked in bed with a man. I can even get by without tenderness. For a while, anyway.”

  “Make a note of this. Comes the day you’re ever naked in bed with this man, there’s going to be tenderness and kissing aplenty.”

  “Just to keep my smart mouth closed, I take it.”

  “I’ll be kissing more than your mouth.”

  “Oh? Where then?”

  “Here and there. Round and about.”

  “Jesus, you really are a wretch, you know that? You can talk to me like that and expect me to act as if I’ve just entered a convent?”

  “I was just telling you how it could be, someday when it can be.”

  Bobbie leaned back and stared at me. “I’m beginning to smell something here, and it isn’t a rat.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Talk about me being a throwback,” Bobbie said. “It’s another woman, isn’t it?”

  “That too is a part of it.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No. God, no.”

  “Just massively hung up.”

  “Something like that.”

  Bobbie rolled her eyes and got up from the table. “Let’s take this act out of here before they begin throwing old fruit at us.”

  I had parked in a public lot next to a dock with piers running out into the bay. A chill wind was blowing off the water, rattling the lines of sailing craft moored nearby and causing Bobbie to wrap her arms around herself and shiver as she waited for me to unlock the car door.

  “Say listen,” she told me, “do you think we could put all the bullshit behind us and you could let me spend the night at your place? I really could do with a night away from that apartment. I’ll sleep on the floor if necessary.”

  “I can put you up and you won’t have to sleep on the floor.”

  We drove on up the hill and I led her down the side steps to my lower apartment. I opened the door and turned on a couple of lights.

  “Be it ever so humble,” I told her.

  “It looks fine,” she said after a quick glance around. “Just one thing, mister.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Now that I know where you live, you’d sure better invite me back here some night when the pressure’s off and you’ve got your head on straight. Or else.”

&
nbsp; “Or else what?”

  “I’ll torch the place.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Diogenes Holmes, known to friends and foes as Dizzy, had a life that was roughly one-third legitimate business, one-third murky business and one-third chasing after women,” said Detective Sergeant Barry Smith. “Unfortunately, at the time of his death, as near as we can estimate, he was engaged in, or had just been engaged in, the third part of the equation, but so far no fun-loving woman has stepped forward to volunteer the information that she might have been the last person to see him alive, bar the killer.” Smith heaved himself out of the chair behind his desk and turned to stare out the window toward the jail building and parking lot.

  “Was his wife much help?” I asked him.

  Smith snorted, and turned back. “His wife has barely given us the time of day. She is in what you could call deep seclusion. I get the impression this has really shattered the woman, as is to be expected. But one doesn’t know if it’s from the loss of her husband or because he had most likely been out with one of his popsies that night.

  “Lionel Mapes, the gay San Francisco waiter who was known to his friends and foes as ‘Lion,’ was last seen leaving work at the Melody Meals Restaurant on Grove Street at about ten o’clock after a slow Tuesday evening. He had first cruised the piano bar at Melody Meals but soon left. His roommate gave us a list of his hangouts but he wasn’t seen in any of them that night. Which could mean he might have been intercepted soon after leaving the restaurant, but nobody we’ve found so far saw any such encounter. His roommate is nearly as grief stricken as Mrs. Holmes.

  “John Clarke, he of the accounting degree and roving eye, was last seen in attendance at one of his seminars on the Clarke CPA program for personal computers. It was held here in Santa Rosa, as it turns out, so it would have been a handy time to take out Mr. Clarke by whoever’s going around slaughtering people and has this compulsion to dump their bodies over at Jack London State Park.”

  “That’s a point that’s bothered me some,” I told him. “What is there about the park that draws this person?”

  “And that is a question I ask myself during my quiet moments, since all this started. That means about the last eleven seconds I’m in bed before falling asleep. Maybe it’s an attention-getting device. Maybe the killer didn’t like any of the stuff London wrote. Who the hell knows? Pershing feels we should check the backgrounds of Pat Davenport and the other park rangers.”

  “What for?”

  “They have access to keys to the padlocks they put on the gates. Our killer has to have a key to the padlocks so he or she can truck in all those bodies. Either that or there’s another road into the park that none of us around here, including Pat Davenport and the other rangers, know about. And what’s that funny look on your face?”

  “You referred to the killer as he or she.”

  “So?”

  “You really think it might be a woman doing all of this?”

  “Could be. After learning about some of the things women belonging to the Weatherman did back in the seventies, you have to consider it as a possibility. It’s a different world out there these days.”

  “I know, but digging all those graves, even shallow graves, seems like a lot of physical work for a woman.”

  “Maybe it’s more than one woman. Or more than one man. I don’t think we’re dealing with just one person here. That’s one of the things I wish your psychic could clarify for us. Oh, while I think about it…”

  He peeled back some papers atop the desk until he found what he was looking for and handed it over. “That’s an updated list of the bodies we’ve so far recovered and identified.”

  There were two columns of names. I recognized one of them as those of the victims. “Who are these other people?”

  “Next of kin or other persons who were closest to the victims. Husband, wife, boyfriend. Father, mother.”

  He knuckled some reports aside. “If your mystery caller should phone again, read that list of victims to him. He might, just might, have heard one of them mentioned by the man he said he met at the bar. If he did, then we somehow are going to have to entice your caller into talking to us. We can help him remember things he doesn’t even know he remembers.”

  “I tried to tell him that.” I ran my eye down the list. “Hello.”

  “What?”

  “One of the persons close to a victim. Karen Ellis. I know her. Or rather I know of her. I had some dealings with the man she used to be married to. He was another private cop.”

  “Which of the victims did she know?”

  “Nancy Dobbs.”

  Smith consulted his own list. “The one with the blood spatter on her chest. She and the Ellis woman were partners in a modeling agency in San Francisco. You say you never actually met her? Did you talk on the phone with her?”

  “No, it was just her husband I encountered. He was pretty much a jerk, but he knew his business. Paid the price, though.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He was shot to death.”

  Smith sat back in his chair. “Would there be any possible connection between that and what’s going on now?”

  “No. The man who shot him was a psychopath who didn’t live much longer himself.”

  “Did you ever want to meet the man’s widow? This Karen Ellis?”

  “No, but I was a little curious about her at one time. Somebody told me she was quite a looker.” I glanced up from the list. Smith was smiling at me.

  “Why? What did you have in mind?”

  “You could save us a little time. One of our people talked on the phone with her, but the team going into the city hasn’t been able to interview her yet. How would you like to show her the list of names and photos of the victims? It’ll be another day or two before we give them out to the press. If she recognizes any of them we’ll get right back to her.”

  “Sure, I’ll do it. I’m a little surprised, though, that you’d want a private dick doing something like that for you.”

  “If you haven’t noticed, we’re a little busy around here. In fact, Bragg, we were a little busy even before you and the psychic woman dumped all this in our laps.”

  We chatted a few moments longer, until Smith’s phone began ringing again, then I left. Pershing was in a closed meeting with the county Board of Supervisors and the sheriff. Smith said they were discussing ground rules.

  The sergeant had phoned me early that morning and asked me to drive up and get an update on information concerning the victims so I in turn could brief Maribeth to see if any of it meant anything to her. I told him I’d do it, but that I’d pick a time to tell Maribeth when I felt she could listen to it all without going into a faint.

  Smith understood. He said that depression seemed to be an ongoing part of the job this time. He said it was affecting members of the department, even, and when I left the Hall of Justice I saw an example of it.

  I had parked on a street beyond the sheriff’s parking lot out back, so I used the rear exit. While I was crossing the lot, an unmarked car drove in with Rachel at the wheel. I cut across the lot and was about to give her a big hello, then hesitated. She had turned off the motor but her hands still gripped the steering wheel and her head was lowered, her eyes shut.

  “Hi, Rachel,” I said lightly.

  It startled her. The window was down on her side, and when she looked up she seemed ready to bawl. Her eyes might already have shed a couple of tears and her mouth was screwed up. She turned away and dug into her handbag for a handkerchief. She blew her nose, replaced the handkerchief then opened the door and got out with a toss of her head, trying grimly to muster up a small grin.

  “Hi yourself. What are you doing here?”

  “Not much of value, I’m afraid. You certainly look like hell.” I tried to keep it light. Friendly banter. Buddy talk.

  Rachel’s face fell and she let out a sob. That was all, just the one sob. Then she was fighting it again, going back into her handbag for the
handkerchief, blowing up a storm, then jamming it back into her bag. She wasn’t a bit ashamed of all this.

  “I guess I’m not as tough as I thought I was,” she told me. “Today we’ve been continuing the little chore of making contact with close relatives or friends of the victims, showing them the names and photos of the other victims, seeing if we can find any connection. Well, this morning I drew Danny McGuire, father of little Donald McGuire, and husband of the woman who committed suicide”—she looked at her watch—“oh, about thirty-six hours ago now, I guess. I told those people inside it was no time to go out there and try talking to him, but oh no, time counts, blah-blah-blah.

  “Well, let me tell you something, Bragg. If you think I look like hell, you should see the way Danny McGuire looks. He’s just had the two most important people in his life torn away from him. He is in ghastly shape. So much so that I phoned the local crisis line and told them they’d better get in touch with him or he’s apt to follow his wife into the garage.”

  She stood there staring me straight in the eye.

  “Are you in a hurry to get back inside?” I asked after a moment.

  “No, I’m not in any hurry to get back inside.”

  “Then take a break. Walk me to my car.”

  “Walk you to your car?” she asked with a fleeting smile as she fell into step beside me. “Isn’t that a little role reversal you’re suggesting there?”

  “Not really.” We walked in silence. When we got to the car I unlocked the passenger side door. “Get in,” I told her.

  She gave me a funny look, then shrugged and got into the car. I went around and climbed in behind the wheel then drove out of the county building complex and across Steele Lane and down to a restaurant and bar I’d noticed on Armory Drive, the frontage road just east of the 101 freeway. When I pulled into the parking lot and started to get out Rachel got out right along with me.

  “I’m beginning to think you’ve just had one of your better ideas,” she told me.

  We went inside and sat at a small table in the roomy bar section. We ordered a couple of beers but didn’t talk much while drinking them. We just stared around at the other customers and listened to their happy mid-afternoon chatter. We only had the one beer each, then left.